Project Argo is a collection of tools and best practices for building topic-focused sites in WordPress

On this site you'll find tools and best practices developed by our team of bloggers, editors and technologists over more than a year of daily, full-time blogging on twelve websites. Our aim was to build a system that would help a single blogger produce a robust, attractive website day after day. If you're building a website that will feature frequent topical posts in a variety of media types, the tools we've built and the lessons we've learned are yours to use and extend.

Even with the right tools, it's not obvious how to reach a robust audience for a topic. In this section, we share what we've learned during Project Argo, and what we recommend to anyone taking on a topical blogging project.

Frame from a presentation exploring different approaches to content planning from around the Argo Network.

Athens is a low-contrast and clutter free child theme perfect for showcasing a variety of post formats.

The Argo theme framework is the result of extensive research into niche-reporting best practices. Within the framework you'll find a feature-rich starter theme and three child themes.

We've developed a collection of plugins optimized for use with the Argo framework, but they aren't limited to Argo. These plugins can be used by any blogger seeking to improve a site's structure, behavior and presentation.

On the back end, our slideshow plugin is a slim 8K of PHP. On the front end, we dynamically load images on-demand and conditionally load the CSS and JS supporting the slideshow.

Our Jiffy Post plugin makes it quick and easy to embed links, photos, videos and rich media on your site using nothing more than a source URL.

In building Argo, we tried to make intelligent use of other open-source projects. Not only did this allow us to focus on making custom features better, but it helped make our well-documented code a rock-solid starting point to extend and customize.